The Tisdale Rangers celebrate their 2-1 series victory over the Birch Hills Brewers. (Tisdale Rangers/Facebook)

By Nick Nielsen

baseball

Highway 3 Baseball League celebrating successful fourth season

Aug 8, 2024 | 3:00 PM

Year four of the Highway 3 Senior Baseball League is in the books and with it, a new champion has been crowned.

The Tisdale Rangers won their first championship since the league began with a 2-1 series win over the Birch Hills Brewers.

Tisdale managed to win game one of the series 8-4 before Birch Hills took game two in an 11-6 offensive slugfest. In game three, Tisdale got out to an early lead and held on for the 3-2 victory according to player and team manager Tanner Kirkland.

“I’d say pretty well everybody played a good role, but Logan Fast was our star pitcher this year, he was the help we needed. We scored three runs in the first inning off a three-run home run. We didn’t think that’d be enough to hold it, but Logan pitched a good game and that was all we needed.”

It was a good year for the newly formed senior baseball league. All eight teams from the 2023 campaign returned for another season this year. Adam Morrison plays for Birch Hills but is also on the Board of Directors for the league, and he said that this is the strongest year the league has seen since its inception.

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“There was some good parity in this league, lots of tight games, the semi-finals and finals were all great series. We couldn’t be happier with the way things went.”

As the dust settles from the 2024 season, the league is now starting to look ahead to next year. For most senior leagues around Saskatchewan, the biggest challenge facing these leagues is travel, and that’s no different with the Highway 3 League spanning 250km from Prince Albert to Hudson Bay.

Because travel can make it so difficult for some teams, Morrison said that the teams within the league work well with each other to make sure that baseball can still be played.

“We split our league up into two divisions to mitigate that quite a bit, and I think most teams are pretty happy with how the divisions are split up every now and then we might tweak them a little bit with the teams and more of a central location and as far as that goes, that went well. Everyone’s been very easy to work with [and] understands what the league is about. At the end of the day, it’s still a working men’s league, so guys are still able to find time to play some ball, which everybody’s happy about.”

While there are no current plans to add teams to the league, Morrison said that the league is open to new teams.

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nick.nielsen@pattisonmedia.com